The China Project

161 Three Decades: The Contemporary Chinese Collection LIU Xiaodong Transvestite (Body no.2) is one of a major series of paintings produced by Liu Xiaodong following a trip to Singapore in 2001. The paintings portray prostitutes and transvestites in their everyday environments — watching television, posing in their bedrooms or walking down the stairs. The works convey a strong sense of dynamic movement reminiscent of snapshot photography — Liu often bases his paintings on photographs. He achieves this dynamism through cropped composition, through the relationships he creates between characters, and through his distinctive, painterly style of raw, impasto brushwork — a technique that nevertheless renders telling details. Referencing the European-derived figuration taught in the early twentieth century, and the Soviet Socialist Realism promoted in China after 1949, Liu and the other New Generation or cynical realists rejected their representational, romantic or didactic bases, and introduced unconventional subject matter and a sense of immediacy. This was in keeping with the broad shift away from the concepts and philosophies — often derived from Western Modernism — that influenced Chinese art in the 1980s, and toward the representation of direct experience. Disillusionment over what was seen as the failure of modernist ideals and freedoms was reflected in a ‘cynical’ take on the world, and a desire to reflect new realities. Consequently, Liu often draws his subjects from his immediate environment: initially friends and family, and later people encountered in the street or on his travels, at work and at play. He portrays both individuals and groups, creating a detailed context for his subjects, be it a bathhouse, a domestic interior, a street or a landscape. The rapid changes experienced in China over the past two decades have been carefully traced in Liu’s paintings, which depict China’s new-found affluence and major infrastructural projects (as in his ‘Three Gorges Dam’ painting cycle, begun in 2003) as well as its less heroic aspects, such as people living on society’s margins. However, at the core of his work are the experiences of individuals, with Liu stating that ‘The people I represent are ordinary people, they are like antiheroes and I am just showing their reality’. 1 This interest in everyday life and individual experience is clearly evident in Transvestite , which presents an unflinching look at a group who do not fit into society’s mainstream but are, at the same time, a presence in contemporary life. Although prostitution and shifting gender roles are centuries old, Liu provides a very modern take on their representation. For many years, he has sought to paint a wide spectrum of humanity with all its anxieties, eccentricities and imperfections. Liu is also interested in fundamental human concerns. He says of this series of paintings: The prostitutes live together in a small room, they are of a different age and it shows in their face. But they share the same fate and destiny… Transvestites…. have an internal conflict, they are at the same time a man and a woman, they blend genders. I was curious about that phenomenon. I can understand people wanting to change sex in their body, but what does it mean in their head, in their heart, in their feeling? I was curious about it. 2 With its gritty, painterly style and subject matter, Transvestite (Body no.2) is an excellent example of Liu Xiaodong’s clear-eyed approach to painting and of the influential neo-realist tradition in post- 1989 Chinese art. endnotes 1 Liu Xiaodong, quoted in The Painting of Modern Life: 1960s to Now [exhibition catalogue], Hayward Publishing, London, 2007, p.139. 2 Liu Xiaodong, quoted in Contemporary Art Asia: China, Korea, Japan [auction catalogue], Sotheby’s, New York, 17 March 2008, lot 96, p.170. Transvestite (Body no.2) 2001 Oil on canvas / 151 x 136cm / Gift of Timothy North and Denise Cuthbert through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 2008